Answering Road's Call

Margie Mccauley, 67, Says A Compelling Force Is Driving Her As She Walks Across The U.s. To Visit A Sister She Hasn't Seen In 50 Years.

May 07, 1996|By Julie Deardorff, Tribune Staff Writer.

In Texas, police had reports of an old woman pushing a wheelchair on the freeway. In Elwood, Ill., a worried resident called in to say they had seen the town vagrant wearing a tie-dyed shirt and walking with a muzzled dog.

But upon further investigation, police discovered in both instances that it was just Margie McCauley, an energetic, talkative 67-year-old grandmother of 15 and mother of seven, who is stubbornly making her way across the United States on foot.

Pushing a three-wheeled cart packed with clothes and camping equipment and fearlessly walking on the shoulder against traffic with her dog, Lollipop, McCauley began the arduous, 2,400-mile journey along the former U.S. Highway 66 a year ago in tiny Landers, Calif. The first leg of her journey is expected to end in Chicago at Buckingham Fountain on Tuesday.

Although the U.S. 66 stretch may be over, McCauley's trip will not be. The thin woman with the weathered, deeply lined face said she plans to walk from Chicago to Connecticut to see a sister for the first time in 50 years.

What's the point? Like other cross-country adventurers, she still does not quite know. But McCauley has pondered the question during lonely stretches of the journey and is positive she heard the road calling.

"Some compelling force is making me do something more than just living my life," said McCauley, stepping over roadkill on a busy stretch of Illinois Highway 53 near Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet. "To leave the comfort of not just my home but my life, to leave my grandchildren means there has to be a reason. I may know it when I'm done. I may never know it."

She seems content with that and travels without knowing where she will end up, trusting something even she cannot name. McCauley began the journey in May 1995. Her husband, Ralph, had died of cancer in 1990 and a frozen yogurt business she ran had failed.

McCauley started walking, beginning with the 74 miles from her home in Landers to pick up the former U.S. 66 in Barstow. She usually camps in her pup tent. Other times she finds a motel. Occasionally, people take her in for the night.

The uncertainty and danger, especially as she neared Chicago, drove members of the Illinois Route 66 Association crazy with concern. Whipping out phone lists, members of the 900-member national fan club, which is dedicated to preserving the once-proud highway, made calls to pinpoint her location.

Then they gently guided her from county to county, welcoming her in and sending her off on the next leg of her journey.

"If she was my mother, I'd be worried sick," said association member Sharon Leone of Midlothian, who spent several days following her with her husband, George. "I'd hope someone would be out there taking care of her."

In Illinois and in several other states, there were. By no means a purist, McCauley was driven along a few stretches where the neighborhoods were too dangerous or where old U.S. 66 was now an interstate, as it is on Interstate Highway 55.

"If I have to be hauled over a bridge, so be it," she said. "I'm not stupid."

In October, she reached St. Clair, Mo., near St. Louis, but then Lollipop, an Akita-Labrador, yanked unexpectedly. She smashed her leg into the cart. Nothing was broken but she returned home to heal.

"It hurt. I was homesick and tired," she confessed. "I thought my place was among family."

After waiting five months, mainly for the weather to improve, she began again on April 15, flying back to St. Clair, where she met Route 66 Association members from Missouri.

"She's crazy. I don't know what else to tell you," said her grandson Jim Carey, 26, of La Quinta, Calif. "Most of us preferred she didn't finish. But she had her mind set. . . . Grandma's very strong-willed and determined. It runs in the family."

Once in Illinois, she and Lollipop averaged 20 miles a day, walking through Bloomington, Pontiac, Dwight, Braidwood, Wilmington and Elwood. In the Joliet area, she stayed for two nights in the home of Duke and Veda Cartwright in Crest Hill.

Duke Cartwright, the longtime chief of security at Stateville Correctional Center until he retired in 1993, was fiercely protective of McCauley and arranged police escorts in Will County, where he is the association's board president. For three days he followed her in his blue pickup truck to make sure she was safe.

George Leone, the Route 66 Association board president in Cook County, and his wife, Sharon, talked McCauley into checking into a motel and resting on Monday before heading through Berwyn and Cicero to Chicago on Tuesday. And they worried about her constantly.

"They're very concerned and it's hard for me to understand the neighborhoods they're talking about," acknowledged McCauley, whose passion for walking comes from her father, a postal worker who ambled in his spare time. McCauley remembers going for 3-mile walks with friends and always wanting to push farther.